Friday Photos: Special U2 Edition

Kelly and I went to Vancouver, BC with some good friends this week to see U2 again! Incredible. I can't really put into words the full experience, but a picture's worth a few words, right?!?

Click here to see the set. Here's a few teasers...

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Friday Photos

It's been a long time since I blogged, but for good reason. We've vacationed, been busy with church, our kids have been doing various activities, we had a family reunion, and now our house is being worked on! So when I've been at my computer, I've been studying or preparing for different things, or even searching for a used Toyota Truck (anyone know of a one for under $2700?). The blog got neglected; but I'll write more soon.

To ease back in, and since it's still Friday, I'm calling for a Friday Photo time. Like I said, we vacationed recently; so I'm including a slideshow of some of the photos from our trip we took to celebrate our 10-year anniversary. You can watch it below! Or you can visit My Flickr page to view the larger and better pictures. Either way, I hope you enjoy taking the virtual journey with us through Canada and New England!

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Reflections On A Decade & A Friday Photo

Ten years ago today was actually a Saturday. I remember that because it was on that day that a girl named Kelly Riley and I walked down the aisle of North Albany Baptist Church in Albany, OR and said our vows to each other - committing to love each other as husband and wife until one of us died. It was a great day for me. I knew pretty early on when Kelly and I started dating that she'd make a great wife. And I was right! I can confidently say that our relationship has grown stronger every year with the ups and downs that life has brought us, and I'd be a mess without having a godly and wonderful woman like Kelly to share life with.

Here are some things that have highlighted our 10 years of marriage, and some things I've picked up along the way. First, things that have happened to us in 10 years...

- We've both finished our Bachelor's degrees
- We've had a combined 8 different jobs (at least)
- We've moved 7 times (3 times between states with 2 moves of more than 2000 miles)
- We've had 2 children
- I've (read: "we've") finished a Master's degree
- We've owned and sold a house
- We've owned 7 different cars (mostly Toyotas)
- We got into debt in our first year of marriage, and then got out of debt over the next few years (we're still debt free, but it's getting harder now that we're living in one of the most expensive cities in the US!)
- We've lost several loved ones (family) to death
- We've had 3 different pets - all cats - and only have 1 fat cat named Joey left
- Speaking of which, I've gained 20 lbs in 10 years (actually a lot more, but I lost a bunch of weight a few years ago). Kelly is the same, even after having 2 kids.
- Both of our eyesight continues to get worse
- We don't really like the same type of movies, but we still like to watch movies together
- We've been to several different states together, but only 3 different countries (I used to travel A LOT more)
- Our guilty pleasure is drinking coffee - sometimes more than once/day
- Our health problems have been relatively rare, but Kelly had an ever-so-slight brush with her mortality when she was pregnant with Bethany, and she's had more health problems than I have (generally speaking).
- We've each matured in our faith for the better
- We're very different today than when we got married
- We both love each other more today than yesterday, the day before, and the day we got married.

What I've learned through all of this...

- If we didn't know Jesus Christ, life together would be much harder. Jesus needs to continue to be the cornerstone of our lives as individuals, and our life together in marriage. This means a dynamic relationship with Jesus where we each experience Him daily, and not just being a good "Christian" family.
- When we are both individually letting the Lord work on our lives through the Bible and through prayer on a constant basis, it actually strengthens our marriage.
- Kelly said to me several years ago that forgiveness is the most important thing that we can offer each other. And I agree. We don't hold bitterness in the times we hurt each other, and we are quick to remember that we play on the same team and we don't want to hurt the other person; but we recognize that is just happens sometimes. That's why forgiveness is important.
- Having a wife who is so vastly different than me in the way she thinks, feels, and views the world is SO INCREDIBLY HELPFUL to me (See Genesis 2:19-25), even if I have to work to understand why she thinks/feels/views something in such a strange way.
- I'm still just beginning to understand what it means when Paul says in Ephesians 5:25, "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church." This means I have more to work on as a husband.
- I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think I'd say that our children are both the biggest blessing, and the most difficult challenge for us. This is partly because we love them so DEEPLY and FIERCELY, and they take so much of our time. So we need to remember to make time for just us without them. That's why we're going on vacation soon with "just us."
- We need to be willing to evaluate the relationship on a regular basis. We need to be willing to ask our spouse on how the relationship is going, and be willing to hear the answer.
- Talking, listening, and laughing with one another is underrated, and is really important.
- We need to read the Bible and pray together as a family. I'm way better at doing this alone, but we've found strength and meaning from doing it together over dinner, or in bed, with the kids, etc.
- We need to be more excited about spending time with our families than anything or anyone else. I enjoy my wife and my family more than (I meant that to be a complete sentence!). I'm so thankful for them. I'd rather spend time with them than with Bono or Junior Griffey, or Tim Keller, or even on the golf course or on the Deschutes River.

Kelly, I'm so thankful for these last 10 years. You're a great wife. You're beautiful. You're thoughtful. You're hard working. And you create a home that makes me want to be there more than anywhere else. I love you for all these things and more that wont go on the blog. Some things just get to stay between me and you! I look forward to the next 10 years and beyond. Most of all, thanks for being a fantastic wife. I cherish you.

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Sanctification, part 4

I sat down to write another post on sanctification today to end this little mini-series, and decided to first do a search on the internet about sanctification to see what others are saying before I wrote. I wanted to write about how the gospel and sanctification are related, so I searched and I found some good things, some, um, interesting things, and some fantastic resources that help people who are wondering what it looks like to live a life that is pleasing to the Lord (Col. 1:10) - not so that we can be accepted by God, but because we are already accepted by God! One article I found was simply compelling. The article is by Jerry Bridges (you may have heard of him!) in Modern Reformation Magazine from the May/June 2003 issue. You should read it. We linked to it on our church website, and besides my Bible, it's one of the most helpful things I've read in a while. I hope we all realize how the gospel impacts our day-to-day living, and not just our salvation.

Check it out: Gospel-Driven Sanctification

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Sanctification, part 3

It was the summer of 1992 when I responded in faith to the person and work of Jesus Christ at a high school summer camp. I was invited by some friends from the church my parents went to, and I reluctantly went to the camp to get away from home for a week. I felt like an outsider for the first few days. I had not been attending church for several years. I had a rough bout of the "junior highs" in my recent past (if you know what I'm saying). And I didn't really know anyone. But it sounded better than staying home where life was also kind of rough for me; so I hopped in the blue striped church van with no seat belts and a really foul smell to spend a week in the shadow of Mt. Rainier. It wasn't long before I made some friends and found myself enjoying the camp. Not that I would have told anyone that.

Towards the end of the week, the man who was speaking every night about something I have no recollection of paying attention to, got up to speak, but instead he tore up his notes. He told us to meet him by the campfire in a few minutes because he had something important to tell us. We all went out, curious about what was happening, yelling the chorus of Lithium because the Yeahs were much easier to sing than to remember the words. When we got out there we sang Kumbaya (evidently the youth leaders didn't think Nirvana was worship), and then the man started talking about Jesus - how he died for my sins, and how he could take away all the pain and anger in our lives - and he was actually weeping as he told us. I was captivated. And it made an indelible mark on me. He told us that we had to repent of our sins and turn to Jesus and we would be saved, and we could experience complete forgiveness. So I did just that. I confessed every sin I had committed that I could think of, I knelt before the cross they had set up and wept, and when I was done, I felt free like never before in my life. It was my first experience with repentance, and it completely changed my life.

Over the next several years, I continually repented of my sins on a constant basis, mostly because I did not know that God's calling is irrevocable. In fact, I kind of lived in fear that if I didn't repent, and I died in a freak bus accident or something, St. Peter would send me to hell because I had to be completely clean of any sins when I entered God's presence (I was a new Christian, c'mon!). On top of that, one of the leaders in a ministry I was involved in was preaching from Matthew 5:48 and said to us that if Jesus said we could be perfect, we should be perfect right now! And it freaked me out because I saw the utter discrepancy between perfect and me. (I now know his teaching was a bit off because he had what's called an "over realized eschatology," but that's for a different blog post!) The point is that over time I began to see that my idea of repentance was a way that Christians could be sinless - which I equated with sanctification. Now what's even stranger is that I think many Christians view repentance this way today: it makes them clean so God will accept them.

The error in this is that it's confusing justification and sanctification. Justification can be thought of in two main ways.

1. The forgiveness of sins.

2. Declaring someone just or righteous.

It has both a legal sense and a personal application. The legal sense is that it's something impartially declared about you which is not based on what you do. The personal sense is that it gives you a new status as forgiven and not guilty or liable. Justification comes at the moment a person responds in faith to Jesus Christ. For me, it was at HS summer camp when I turned my heart over to Jesus. At that moment, I was declared righteous and justified by God, through the work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit, and this was the moment that I was made clean and acceptable to God forever. I was forgiven for every sin, past, present, and future. And even though I would continue to sin and still choose to reject God at various times in my life, I was declared right from that moment on. I did not need to continually ask forgiveness for my future sins IN ORDER TO be accepted by God. Jesus made me acceptable on the spot. And if you are a Christian, this is true for you, as well! You are completely accepted by God regardless of how much you sin or don't.

Sanctification is different than this because one of the main things to understand about sanctification is that it's a process. It is not a "once-off" event. Rather, it is a continual response to God's goodness in his work of saving your sorry self (and mine!), whereby we live under the power of the Holy Spirit to continually work on killing sin in our own lives. It has nothing to do with whether we are accepted or not. It has everything to do with how we should live because we are accepted. Sanctify commonly means "to set apart" in the New Testament. And for Christians, we are exhorted in God's Word to continually set ourselves apart from the world and the evil ways of the world. So when we talk about sanctification, we are not talking about making ourselves more acceptable to God, we are talking about becoming more and more like like Jesus Christ because that is God's will for our lives.

This has everything to do with repentance because in order to become more like Jesus, we have to continually "die to sin and live to righteousness" (1 Peter 2:24). In repentance, we are acknowledging we're not there yet, we still struggle with sin, and we actually CANNOT be justified by our goodness. So we live a lifestyle of repentance to declare our absolute need for Jesus' help, and to make us more sensitive God's Spirit working in our lives. Repentance is not an act of appeasement or a satisfying penance. It is a declaration of need. This is why most of the time the word "repent" is used in the Bible it is directed to God's people. Repentance is a part of the sanctifying process God is working in us where we learning to be the people God created us to be.

I really like how Calvin links repentance and sanctification in his Institutes. He says that sanctification is the process by which we are ‘more and more’ being ‘consecrated to the Lord in true purity of life’ and ‘our hearts formed to obedience to the law’ by the indwelling of Christ through the Holy Spirit. He goes on to say,

In one word, then, by repentance I understand regeneration, the only aim of which is to form in us anew the image of God... Accordingly through the blessing of Christ we are renewed by that regeneration into the righteousness of God from which we had fallen through Adam, the Lord being pleased in this manner to restore the integrity of all whom he appoints to the inheritance of life. This renewal, indeed, is not accomplished in a moment, a day, or a year, but by uninterrupted, sometimes even by slow progress God abolishes the remains of carnal corruption in his elect, cleanses them from pollution, and consecrates them as his temples, restoring all their inclinations to real purity, so that during their whole lives they may practice repentance, and know that death is the only termination to this warfare... Therefore God assigns repentance as the goal towards which they must keep running during the whole course of their lives. (Institutes, 3.3.9)

Amen to that! I think I may have one more post on sanctification. I keep thinking of other things that are important for people to know, believe, and live out. (Oh, the dilemma of a preacher!)

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Friday Photos

I'm sitting at Les Schwab right now spending so much money on tires for my car that I'm depressed. But these pictures made me happier, so by posting them I'm hoping it will set the stage for the rest of my day! I hope you enjoy them, as well. We live very close to Gasworks park and have gone down a few times for a picnic dinner on the water. I brought the camera...

Have a great Friday! Check out the rest of my photography here!

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Sanctification, part 2

1 Thessalonians 4:3 "For this is the will of God, your sanctification"

Last time I blogged about sanctification, I tried to answer the question, "What is sanctification?" and showed how different folks tend to think of the work of sanctification in their lives. I have read different books in my life on the topic, both from an imperative perspective and from an indicative approach, and have found both views to be very helpful at different times in my life. Every now and then I need a swift kick to jump-start my spiritual walk. Other times I need the reminder that I simply cannot do anything apart from God's miracle working in my heart to make me more Christlike in my thoughts and/or actions. Maybe you relate to this? I contend that we need a healthy balance between the two ideas, and try not to swing too far toward either perspective.

One of the reasons I think this is an important reminder is because Christians live in a unique time period where we are defined as both saved (“For by grace you have been saved” Ephesians 2:8 ESV), and being saved (“by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you” 1 Corinthians 15:2 ESV). Scholars call this idea inaugurated eschatology, but it would be much easier to think of it in the more common language of the already/not yet! In other words we are saved right now, but there is a future element to our "saving," as well. This idea can be seen all throughout the New Testament in the way both the church as an institution and as a people are defined. We can especially see it in some of Jesus' sayings while he lived and ministered on earth. For instance, when Jesus said “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10 ESV), some people wonder why their life isn't more abundant and why they are still experiencing pain, disappointment, and most of all, sin. This is because Jesus had in mind a present reality, and a vision for the future of His people. Jesus did come to give people life abundant, but it will not be fully realized until they spend eternity with Him. So it doesn't only mean our life in Christ is abundant as can be right now, but rather since Jesus is alive, He is still working, and we have more to look forward to.

This relates significantly to our sanctification because our sanctification is an already/not yet idea in Scripture, as well. Christians are both called already sanctified in 1 Corinthians 6:11 (“you were sanctified”), but are exhorted to be holy in 1 Peter 1:16 (“You shall be holy, for I am holy"). How can we try to be holy if we are already sanctified? We can because we're still incomplete. We've already been defined by the Lord (the already), but we still deal with living in a broken world, and we're still broken people (the not yet). Consquently, that is why Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be with us to “convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8 ESV). It's also revealing to know that the Bible also speaks of a final sanctification of Jesus' bride in Ephesians 5:27: “...he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” This is great news because although Jesus has both paid the price for the consequences of our sins by taking the wrath of God against sin upon Himself at the cross, and has justified us by declaring us righteous through this act (both final and complete), we are still works in progress. Ask the Christian addict. Talk to the teenager who asked Jesus into his or her heart 35 times last year. Look to your own heart and see how far you still need to come!

But God wills for our sanctification, and we should bank on that promise. It comes in various ways right now. We need to both make strides in being more Christlike today and everyday since our sanctification is already given to us as a gift and responsibility, and rest securely that even if we take two steps forward and then take 3 steps back, there will still be a day when God will complete the work in us. I know that's hard to imagine what that will look like, but isn't that just one more reason to be thankful and amazed and respond to the Gospel each day?

Next up: How does repentance relate to sanctification?

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